A leading name in home and business physical security, Brinks Home, recently said it identified unauthorized access to a portion of its IT systems, an intrusion ShinyHunters claims it carried out to steal millions of records from the security provider's Salesforce instance. Brinks Home hasn’t named the intruder or identified the affected system, but said the responsible party has threatened to leak information it claims to have taken. “Brinks Home is working diligently to determine what information was involved and who may be affected,” the company statement said. “If the Company determines that personal information has been affected, it will notify those individuals as required and as appropriate.” An FAQ page for the incident said that Brinks Home products and services weren’t affected, as far as the company knows at this point, so alarms and other security tools should be working without issue. While Brinks may not have been very forthcoming with information, and lacks any sort of official way for media to communicate with it outside of sending a LinkedIn message it didn’t answer, the party that’s claimed responsibility has gone public with some details, and it’s none other than ShinyHunters with another claimed Salesforce breach. According to leak site monitoring outfit Ransomware.live, ShinyHunters claimed to have obtained more than 4.9 million Salesforce records from Brinks Home “containing some PII.” The group threatened this week to leak the data along with causing “several annoying digital problems” if Brinks Home didn’t reach out by Thursday, July 30, to negotiate a ransom payment. It’s not clear if Brinks Home has contacted ShinyHunters; Brinks Home didn’t respond to messages, and contacts The Register has for ShinyHunters appear to have changed, causing message and email rejections. ShinyHunters has been a prolific Salesforce intruder of late, with the group claiming earlier this year to have stolen data from around 100 high-profile companies’ Salesforce instances. Salesforce has previously warned that an unnamed known threat actor group was actively scanning for public-facing Salesforce instances and abusing misconfigured guest accounts to break in. Brinks Home is no longer part of the larger Brinks brand, with The Brinks Company telling us it sold the home security arm in 2010. Brinks Home’s parent company, Monitronics, has filed for bankruptcy twice since 2019; for customers’ sake, we hope its physical security services are better than its financial management and infosec. ®

One company's inventive campaign for an unreleased product has become a contest between Anthropic and OpenAI to see which can shout the loudest about its own failures. Readers who tuned in earlier today saw the latest episode in the drama – or sitcom – as Anthropic tried to outdo OpenAI's appropriation of the Mythos marketing playbook and made itself the punchline. Since first teasing Mythos in April, Anthropic has marketed the model through fear – declaring its cybersecurity models too dangerous for public release and offering access only to a select few trusted organizations via Project Glasswing. To its credit, the strategy has paid off. Anthropic has closely associated the Mythos name with cybersecurity, which may explain why OpenAI appeared to borrow its competitor's proven PR strategy last week. OpenAI agents exploited a zero-day to escape their sandbox, leading to the autonomous cyberattack on Hugging Face. The episode duly secured sensational headlines playing on the long-held fear that AI will one day go rogue and take over the world. Anthropic responded this week by lathering on even more clown makeup, squandering an opportunity in the process. The Claude maker sent its models into a testing environment to capture a flag. Their prompts said they had no internet access, but because of what Anthropic called "a misunderstanding" with evaluation partner Irregular, the connection was live. Anthropic's models then followed OpenAI's script: they reached the public internet and attacked systems belonging to outside organizations. This time, three were affected rather than one, the company admitted. In one scenario, Mythos 5 persuaded developers to download a poisoned PyPI package. It was installed on 15 machines, including one at a cybersecurity company that routinely scans such packages for malware. In Anthropic's words: "When that company's scanner installed the package, Claude's hidden code executed. We believe the company's security scanner treated PyPI packages as safe to install, and as a result, Claude was able to exfiltrate the company’s credentials to a collection point it had set up. Claude then used these credentials to access further infrastructure from this company." Worse still, the first of the three incidents occurred in April. Anthropic discovered them only months later, during a retrospective manual review prompted by OpenAI's disclosure. Had it not gone looking, they might never have been discovered, let alone disclosed. There are some caveats. Opus 4.7, the oldest model tested, attacked production systems despite apparently recognizing what it was doing. Mythos 5 recognized that accessing the internet violated its instructions, then reasoned its way into continuing anyway. It was also responsible for publishing the poisoned PyPI package. Only an unnamed research model stopped itself from attacking external organizations. Anthropic also said the models were not running with the production safeguards and monitoring that would normally surround a deployment. Most damningly, Anthropic ran Mythos 5 – the model it had deemed too dangerous for public release – without safeguards in an environment that unexpectedly had internet access. Following OpenAI's admission that it failed so badly in its responsibility to control its technology, Anthropic could have easily spun the story in its favor. You don't have to be fictional tapdancing political PR antihero Malcolm Tucker to see how Anthropic could have used the episode to make its case as the safer, more trustworthy AI company. Instead, realizing its own marketing playbook was being used to help a competitor, it went head-to-head with OpenAI, willingly admitted that it made similar sandbox-based blunders, and disclosed that the results were even more calamitous. Three companies hacked, not just one. So, while the AI biz has attempted to eclipse OpenAI's "rogue agent" story with its own, what's left behind is a new reputation for irresponsible handling of technology. Failed superheroes The incident does not instill a great deal of trust in either Anthropic or OpenAi to safeguard the world from its AI. Dr Ilia Kolochenko, founder of ImmuniWeb and practising cybersecurity and data protection lawyer, likened the two companies to failed superheroes. "While making conclusions would be a bit premature at this point in time, the incidents certainly do not increase confidence in the AI vendor's ability to safely deploy AI, let alone to assure their customers that the so-called frontier models are safe to use," he told The Register. "It is akin to hiring a superhero to protect you but being afraid that the superhero may suddenly go rogue and kill you and your family. Nobody needs such a superhero." Likewise, security pro Jake Williams, VP at HunterStrategy and IANS faculty member, said: "I'm not going to mince words: the major AI labs are negligent in protecting the public from their agents. "We need government regulation now or at the very least a private cause of action with guaranteed punitive damages for agents damaging others." By trying to reclaim a marketing trope that served it well, Anthropic has invited scrutiny of its own safety record and accusations that it is chasing attention above all else. Other experts we spoke to shared the concern that both companies are mishandling their agents, with potentially greater consequences as the systems become more capable. The common thread is recklessness, which Anthropic and OpenAI seem oddly eager to advertise. ®

A week after suspending online banking, CAF Bank still has no timetable for restoring access to its 14,000 UK charity customers. The bank updated customers on Thursday about the outage, which has disrupted payments to staff and suppliers. Little had changed. In a message seen by The Register, CAF Bank said it was not yet able to restore the service safely. As it had earlier in the week, the bank said it detected attempted fraud on some accounts and acted quickly to stop it. Its investigation uncovered a previously unknown vulnerability in the connection between its systems and third-party software. CAF Bank said its technical team was working around the clock with suppliers and external experts on a fix. The Register understands that no timetable has been set for restoring online banking. Earlier this week, CAF Bank CEO Alison Taylor apologized for the disruption. "The core bank is not affected. We are acutely aware of the impact this has on our customers and want this to be fixed as soon as possible, but we cannot restore access to the online service until we are assured the issue is safely resolved," she said. Since The Register first reported the story earlier this week, the BBC has spoken to charities struggling to make essential payments, including payroll. Kevan Hodges, chief executive of Down's syndrome charity 21 Together, told the BBC the outage was "appalling." "People are concerned that wages won't get paid because of this, and that's just stressful when they have bills to pay. My team have wasted days trying to get through to [CAF Bank], but all in vain," he said. Bali Rodgers, chief executive of Safer Communities Alliance, told the BBC the grassroots organizations it represents were slowly losing trust in the bank. CAF Bank also came under fire last year after the introduction of a new banking platform left customers unable to log in or make transactions. The bank later apologized but has not disclosed how much it spent on the system. CAF Bank held £1.45 billion ($1.93 billion) in customer deposits at the end of its 2024/25 financial year. ®

Anthropic has admitted that its Claude models escaped sandboxes to access the open internet and attack three organizations – but has also advanced decent excuses for the incidents. The AI upstart discovered the attacks after checking if security tests of its models had ever produced results similar to the attack on Hugging Face made possible by OpenAI models escaping onto the internet. “In particular, we looked for evidence that Claude – like the OpenAI models that accessed Hugging Face – was able to access the internet from within testing environments that should have been sealed off,” Anthropic wrote. The company considered 141,006 evaluation runs during which Claude could have obtained internet access and found “three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations.” Anthropic’s code made those intrusions while participating in capture-the-flag challenges, tests that challenge attackers to retrieve a piece of information. Human hackers often participate in capture-the-flag tests, so figuring out how AI tackles such tasks is of interest. Anthropic works with a company called Irregular to conduct tests of this sort. Irregular told Anthropic its test environments did not allow internet access. “Due to a misunderstanding between us and our evaluation partner, this was not the case, and internet access was available,” wrote Anthropic’s Frontier Red Team in a Thursday blog post. “Because of this, when Claude’s search led it to real systems on the open internet, it treated them as part of the exercise.” One of the attacks targeted a domain that whoever set up the test thought was fictional. However the domain was live and in use. Told to capture a flag at that site, Claude attacked. Anthropic says its models used only “basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints” to attack. “It did not find or exploit any complex vulnerabilities, and in each case, Claude continued working to complete only the specific capture-the-flag task its evaluation had assigned,” the AI upstart claimed. “In none of these situations did Claude exfiltrate itself or deliberately attempt to escape its test environment,” Anthropic pointed out. But Claude was still fiendishly clever as in another of its attacks the AI found setup instructions for developers that advised them to install a Python package from PyPI. That package did not exist so Claude’s strategy to capture the flag saw it create and publish a malicious one with the relevant name. “Claude believed the package registry it was using to be part of the simulation, but in reality the package was made freely available online for roughly one hour. During that window, the package was downloaded and run on 15 real systems,” Anthropic admitted. Claude also eventually realized it could access the open internet despite instructions not to go there. Opus 4.7, the oldest Anthropic model used in the test, kept going regardless. “Mythos 5 correctly intuited that it was accessing the open internet, but reasoned its way back to the conclusion that it was still in a simulation,” Anthropic wrote. “Our latest model, an internal research test model, also considered whether its targets were in fact real. When evidence emerged that they were, it stopped the exercise.” Anthropic’s post offers the usual pledges to be more careful when setting up future tests, and to make sure its models can’t make the mistakes that allowed the attacks to happen. But the company has also given itself a pass, claiming that the safeguards in the models it sells “would have blocked the behaviors identified.” “We believe these incidents to be closer to a harness and operational failure than a model alignment failure,” the post states, and contrasts that assessment with a more damning assessment of OpenAI’s incident. “Our models were told they had no internet access and to capture the flag, while in fact being misconfigured to have internet access. This led them to believe – arguably reasonably – that the real environments they encountered were simulations.” “These facts give us cautious optimism that with tighter monitoring and controls around evaluation infrastructure, as well as continued investment in alignment, this type of risk can be overcome,” the post concludes. This leaves one of the world’s leading AI labs admitting it has acted carelessly when constructing tests, and caused harm, but also claiming it can make future tests foolproof. ®